On the evening of January 22, 1962, New Yorker editor William Shawn called Rachel Carson to tell her that her forthcoming book, Silent Spring, was “a brilliant achievement.” Shawn planned to publish excerpts from the book in The New Yorker prior to its release. He told her that she had made the subject matter of the book—the damage caused by unregulated pesticide and insecticide use—into “literature.”
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The next morning, Carson wrote a letter to Dorothy Freeman telling her that she had “longed so” for her the night before “to share my thoughts and feelings.” Carson wrote to Freeman: “suddenly I knew from his reaction that my message would get across…I think I let you see last summer what my deeper feelings are about this when I said I could never again listen happily to a thrush song if I had not done all I could.”
It is not surprising that Carson chose to share her intimate feelings about this important moment with Freeman. Carson and Freeman had fallen in love in 1953, when Carson built a cottage on Southport Island, Maine near the summer home Freeman owned with her husband Stanley.
For the past nine years, Carson’s pleasure in listening to thrush songs and experiencing the beauty of nature had been connected to her relationship with Freeman. In fact, Carson’s relationship with Freeman was a major motivating factor for Carson in writing Silent Spring.
Carson recognized that thrushes (and the ocean and woods and moon and wind) made her love with Freeman possible, and she wrote Silent Spring to fight the forces of capitalism and industry that threatened that vibrant natural world.
Carson recognized that thrushes (and the ocean and woods and moon and wind) made her love with Freeman possible, and she wrote Silent Spring to fight the forces of capitalism and industry that threatened that vibrant natural world.
Most of us do not know the story of Freeman and Carson, let alone that it was a key spark for Silent Spring. Children’s and young adult books on Carson barely mention Freeman. Biographies of Carson discuss the relationship with Freeman, but portray it as largely separate from Carson’s writing and public life.
This gap in our public knowledge is surely due to what queer theorists call “heteronormativity”: how the social norm of heterosexuality drives our cultural understandings of happiness, meaningfulness, and the good life.
Heteronormativity is not only about who you are sexually or romantically attracted to (gay and lesbian couples can live heteronormatively). It is about sociocultural norms that discipline individuals into seeing a particular kind of life (think: marriage, home ownership, the nuclear family, consumerism) as the only route to happiness.
It is important for us to learn Carson and Freeman’s story now because it holds an urgent lesson for climate politics today: that un-learning heteronormativity may be just as significant to fighting climate change as political organizing for policy change on the ground. It was Carson’s experience of a love that did not fit into existing social categories, and that was created with the help of the natural world, that helped her find the courage to fight what she increasingly came to view as a deadening world of capitalism and consumerism.
Similarly, today, affirming intimate pleasurable feelings and experiences that seem “queer” in late capitalism (i.e. not fitting into the heteronormative, consumptive idea of the good life) may be a necessary part of building popular support for a new, sustainable way of life.
Carson was an important nature writer before she met Dorothy Freeman, but Carson’s work largely veered clear of politics and controversy. It was only after Carson met Freeman that she found the political urgency and courage to write Silent Spring.
Meeting only briefly in person in 1953, Carson and Freeman began writing multiple letters per week to each other, and fairly quickly exchanged professions of love. In December of 1953, Carson wrote to Freeman (in response to letters no longer extant): “as you must know in your heart, there is such a simple answer for all the ‘whys’ that are sprinkled through your letters: as why do I keep your letters? Why did I come to the Head that last night? Why? Because I love you!”
From the very beginning, birds, tides, the moon, the wind, and other parts of nature were key participants in Carson and Freeman’s love. Where many people of this era who experienced same-gender love wrestled with socially engrained shame and disgust, Carson and Freeman instead found their love mysteriously beautiful because they saw its failure to fit into existing social categories as analogous to the beauty of nature.
Foremost among their experiences of nature that they analogized to their love was listening for the call of the veery, a species of thrush. Many of their letters feature descriptions of seeking the veery, or listening to its call, which consists in a mysterious two-toned sound.
Seeing in their love (in Carson’s words) a “mystery beyond all the explainable mysteries, Carson and Freeman called the puzzling pleasure of their love “wonder” and went on to describe the mystery of nature’s beauty in the same way. Carson published a now famous essay in 1954 entitled “Teaching Your Child to Wonder,” where she described wonder as an emotional experience of beauty and joy that exceeds human categories of understanding.
The essay focused on wondrous encounters with nature, but it emerged out of Carson’s and Freeman’s lengthy discussions of wonder at their love, and featured a veiled description of a night Carson spent with Freeman looking at the stars on Southport Island.
The value of wonder, according to Carson’s essay, lies in how wonder spurs people to live differently, to forgo the “sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial” in favor of seeking real meaning and pleasure in nature and love.
Carson’s research and writing of Silent Spring emerged out of her growing sense that industry and capitalism threatened the experience of wonder. In Silent Spring, Carson indicts what she calls the ideology of “the sterile world” promoted by capitalism and industry.
She argues that the chemical industry has produced the idea of “pests” and “weeds” so as to market products that kill them. The industry sells the public a dream of ease and comfort that is only available (they say) through killing off or extracting resources from the plants and creatures of the earth.
Carson offered many examples of industry’s “sterile world” ideology in the book. Perhaps the most famous example is of the USDA program to eradicate the fire ant in Alabama and elsewhere in the South. While the fire ant posed only a slight public health risk (mainly involving discomfort), a giant DDT spraying program was undertaken that killed other wildlife in the area and posed a threat to human health.
Carson scattered many other smaller examples in the book of the cost of continuing to pursue the dream of the “sterile world.” For example, while killing wildflowers on the side of the road through a spraying program may allow cars to speed faster down the highway, it also narrows our possibilities for beauty, wonder, and meaning.
In our contemporary moment, it is difficult for many members of the public to imagine how we could live good lives in a state that drastically reduces fossil fuel usage and radically regulates industry and corporations.
Carson emphasized in Silent Spring that our individual, intimate happiness is lost when we allow industry to run amok without regulation—because she knew that intimate life and politics are connected. If the public only has the dream of the “sterile world” through which to imagine what a good life looks like, they have little incentive to demand regulations to save nature.
Only by showing them how intimate happiness is threatened by the sterile world can they be inspired to act politically to demand greater regulation by the state.
In the early 1960’s, Carson’s book sparked wide public outcry, congressional hearings, and demand for greater regulation of the chemical industry. Silent Spring was also influential in the formation of the modern environmental movement and the Environmental Protection Agency.
In our contemporary moment, it is difficult for many members of the public to imagine how we could live good lives in a state that drastically reduces fossil fuel usage and radically regulates industry and corporations. We have been taught that vast energy usage and consumption, in the model of the “sterile world,” is necessary to the heteronormative “good life.”
What Carson shows us is that good lives are actually only possible if we risk affirming our queerness: noticing and seeking out what actually gives us pleasure and meaning, undisciplined by the dream of the sterile world.
If we can value our queer feelings and experiences and teach our children to do the same, this is the beginning of building a future we want (rather than the one we are told we should want) and demanding, as Carson did, the state intervention and regulation necessary to create it.
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Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell is available via Stanford University Press.